Days #1-3- Sunday- Tuesday, May 13-15, 2012

The day began with finishing up packing and gathering last minute items.  Jolin, her parents, sister, and myself went to the church that they attend for some time for the pastor and deacons to pray over us before we left.  I then began my journey with Jolin’s parents dropping us off at the Allentown Airport where we met up with Coach, Hannah, and Claudia around 11am.  We got all checked in and ready to go for our 1pm flight to Detroit.  That flight was only about 2 ½ hours.  While in Detroit we met up with the rest of the BBC team and awaited the arrival of the Faith team.  After waiting patiently for 4 hours, the whole team was together for the first time!  We all waited an hour, gathered some dinner and boarded our plane for a 6 hour flight to Amsterdam.  It began around 11pm EST and we landed in Amsterdam around 8am.  We had just over an hour to go through security and get on our final flight for the day to Johannesburg.  After a long 11 hour flight we finally landed in South Africa! We gathered all of our luggage at 11pm (SA time) and stayed at a local hotel for the night, got up and were back in the airport by 8am for our final flight to Durban.  This one was only about 1 ½ hours.  (so total hours for travelling was around 21 hours on just the planes.)  Before we knew it we were back on land and heading to our first location- Pheonix Fellowship Church.  We met the pastor, had our first meal in Africa (pizza), got a tour of the church that we will be helping to build, went to the local mall- The Plaza- and went back to the church to be given our home assignments for the next couple of days.  We were then all split into groups for our home assignments, and Jolin and I got to stay together!  The two of us, Brenda, and Coach went to Pastor Darrell’s home for our first amazing home cooked African dinner, dessert and tea.  We were then picked up by our host family who consists of a mother, father, and a one year old little girl.  Jolin and I couldn’t have been more blessed with the opportunities that God has given us so far on this trip! Now it’s time for our first real full night’s sleep since Saturday night.   This is our first host family- Brad “Bones”, Kathy and Amber.